Phillip A. Cooke & David Maw 
The Music of Herbert Howells 

The first large-scale study of the music of Herbert Howells, prodigiously gifted musician and favourite student of the notoriously hard-to-please Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.


Herbert Howells (1892-1983) was a prodigiously gifted musician and the favourite student of the notoriously hard-to-please Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Throughout his long life, he was one of the country’s most prominent composers, writing extensively in all genres except the symphony and opera. Yet today he is known mostly for his church music, and there is as yet relatively little serious study of his work. This book is the first large-scale study of Howells’s music, affording both detailed consideration of individual works and a broad survey of general characteristics and issues.

Its coverage is wide-ranging, addressing all aspects of the composer’s prolific output and probing many of the issues that it raises. The essays are gathered in five sections: Howells the Stylist examines one of the most striking aspect of the composer’s music, its strongly characterised personal voice; Howells the Vocal Composer addresses both his well-known contribution to church music and his less familiar, but also important, contribution to the genre of solo song; Howells the Instrumental Composer shows that he was no less accomplished for his work in genres without words, for which, in fact, he first made his name; Howells the Modern considers the composer’s rather overlooked contribution to the development of a modern voice for British music; and Howells in Mourning explores the important impact of his son’s death on his life and work.

The composer that emerges from these studies is a complex figure: technically fluent but prone to revision and self-doubt; innovative but also conservative; a composer with an improvisational sense of flow who had a firm grasp of musical form; an exponent of British musical style who owed as much to continental influence as to his national heritage. This volume, comprising a collection of outstanding essays by established writers and emergent scholars, opens up the range of Howells’s achievement to a wider audience, both professional and amateur.


PHILLIP COOKE is Lecturer in Composition at the University of Aberdeen.


DAVID MAW is Tutor and Research Fellow in Music at Oriel College, Oxford, holding Lectureships also at Christ Church, The Queen’s and Trinity Colleges.


CONTRIBUTORS: Byron Adams, Paul Andrews, Graham Barber, Jonathan Clinch, Phillip A. Cooke, Jeremy Dibble, Lewis Foreman, Fabian Huss, David Maw, Diane Nolan Cooke, Lionel Pike, Paul Spicer, Jonathan White. Foreword by John Rutter.

Table des matières

Foreword – John Rutter

Introduction: Paradox of an establishment composer – David Maw

‘In matters of art friendship should not count’: Stanford and Howells – Jonathan White

Howells and Counterpoint – Lionel Pike

Window on a Complex Style: Six Pieces for Organ – Diane Nolan Cooke

‘Hidden Artifice’: Howells as Song-Writer – Jeremy Dibble

A ‘Wholly New Chapter’ in Service Music:
Collegium Regale and the
Gloucester Service – Phillip A. Cooke

Howells’s Use of the Melisma: Word Setting in his Songs and Choral Music – Paul Spicer

‘From Merry Eye to Paradise’: the Early Orchestral Music of Herbert Howells – Lewis Foreman

Lost, Remembered, Mislaid, Re-written: A documentary study of
In Gloucestershire – Paul Andrews

Style and Structure in the Oboe Sonata and Clarinet Sonata – Fabian Huss

‘Tunes all the way’? Romantic Modernism and the Piano Concertos of Herbert Howells – Jonathan Clinch

‘a ‘modern’…but a Britisher too’: Howells and the Phantasy – David Maw

Austerity, Difficulty and Retrospection: The Late Style of Herbert Howells – Phillip A. Cooke

‘In Modo Elegiaco’: Howells and the Sarabande – Graham Barber

On Hermeneutics in Howells: Some Thoughts on Interpreting his Cello Concerto – Jonathan Clinch

Musical Cenotaph: Howells’s
Hymnus Paradisi and Sites of Mourning – Byron Adams

Appendix: Catalogue of the Works of Herbert Howells – Paul Andrews

Bibliography of Works Cited

A propos de l’auteur

JEREMY DIBBLE is Professor of Music at Durham University. He is the author of C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (1998), Charles Villers Stanford: Man and Musician (2002), Michele Esposito (2010). With Boydell, Dibble has published John Stainer: A Life in Music (2007), Hamilton Harty: Musical Polymath (2013), British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850-1950 (2018) (with Julian Horton).